There are literary critics who insist that Ernest Hemingway was a tortured queer and
that Mark Twain was haunted to the end of his days by a penchant for interracial buggery.
It is a good way to stir up a tempest in the academic quarterlies, but it won’t change a word
of what either man wrote, nor alter the impact of their work on the world they were
writing about. Perhaps Manolete was a hoof fetishist, or suffered from terrible hemorrhoids
as a result of long nights in Spanish horn parlors… but he was a great matador, and it is
hard to see how any amount of Freudian theorizing can have the slightest effect on the
reality of the thing he did best.